


Paraskevidekatriaphobia

by MasteroftheCrypticArts



Series: Optiverse [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Optiverse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-09-30 14:22:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17225681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MasteroftheCrypticArts/pseuds/MasteroftheCrypticArts
Summary: Doctor Strange discovers a man cursed with a dangerous power: the ability to strike misfortune upon other people with impartiality. The afflicted soul, Mallory Murphy, has no control over this chaotic force constricting his life and Strange has resolved to help him. Setting to this task pits him against very steep odds.





	1. Detention

**Author's Note:**

> Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the Fear of Friday the Thirteenth.

❝ _It is an experience common to all men to find that, on any sᴘᴇᴄɪᴀʟ ᴏᴄᴄᴀsɪᴏɴ, such as the production of a magical effect for the first time in public, ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴄᴀɴ ɢᴏ ᴡʀᴏɴɢ ᴡɪʟʟ ɢᴏ ᴡʀᴏɴɢ. Whether we must attribute this to the malignity of matter or to the total depravity of inanimate things, whether the exciting cause is hurry, ᴡᴏʀʀʏ, or what not, the fact remains._ ❞

—Nevil Maskelyne, "The Art of Magic," The Magic Circular (1908)

 

 

Prior to his life as a Master of the Mystic Arts, Stephen Strange disdained Friday the Thirteenth. It was nothing more than a fear-mongering day that provoked superstitious histrionics. He had known plenty of people who heeded the Thirteenth throughout his life but he hadn't before met any parakevidekatriaphobic people. If it weren’t for his discovering the existence of one Mallory Murphy, Stephen would have passed through another Friday the Thirteenth without so much as a scratch.

Mallory Murphy, a short man of considerable stock, sat alone in the dining room within the Sanctum Sanctorum. He was at the broad side of the mahogany table, sweaty palms spread flat on its surface, looking as if one wrong move would kill him on the spot. His eyes slid around the room with extreme caution. He was gazing at the fractured atmosphere of the Mirror Dimension.

The sound of glass cracking made him jump. On the other side of the table, a wall of angular fissures appeared out of thin air. A tall, distorted figure entered through it. Once it passed through the threshold and into the room with him, it—he became clear. Murphy freaked.

“You—! What the hell is this?!”

"Mr. Murphy, my name is Dr. Stephen Strange—”

“ _Strange?_ ” Murphy scoffed. “Now that's fucking ironic—”

“Not more ironic than your own name, I assure you.”

“Huh?”

“Have you ever heard of _Murphy's Law?_ ”

The expression he received answered the question. Stephen withheld a sigh, dismissed his own tangent, and started again.

“My name is Dr. Stephen Strange. I'm a Master of the Mystic Arts.”

“A-A what?”

“A fancy name for a sorcerer.”

“Uh…,” Murphy gave a nervous laugh, “okay, what am I tripping on?”

“You haven't been drugged.”

“Then what in hell’s ass am I seeing?”

“We’re in another dimension that closely parallels ours.”

Murphy stared at him with a mixture of terror and bewilderment on his face..

“...Alrighty, Dr. Whack”—Stephen’s eyes narrowed—“neat trick with the holographic refractions, I’ll give you that, but, uh, this is where I get off—”

Murphy rose. The Cloak of Levitation bolted from Stephen’s shoulders, vaulted over the table, grabbed Murphy’s, and shoved him back into his seat. It happened so fast that his eyes bugged.

“ _...The fuck?_ ” he squeaked. The Cloak released him but hovered just behind his chair. “Y—You can’t keep me here—”

“Can’t I?” Stephen challenged.

“No! This is… abduction! HELP!” He tried to rise again but the Cloak restrained him. He writhed in its constrictive embrace. “HELP—”

“Mr. Murphy— _Mallory_ , you know as well as I do that I cannot and _should not_ let you leave.”

Murphy gave up his hysteric fit and his line of sight fell into his own lap. Stephen watched him with eyes that had a razor’s edge. He may have been agitated on account of the fact that his Eldritch magic got short-circuited in the confrontation and detention that preceded this moment—a feat of Murphy’s unintentional doing. Stephen had been forced to use a Conjurer’s Cone to banish his detainee from the streets of Tribeca. His body ached; mystic energy cramping in his physical form. He didn’t see that Murphy’s hands, curled on his thighs, were shaking just below the table. After his patience was tested enough, Stephen began the onslaught.

“The destruction you caused— _You almost killed people_.”

“I—I didn’t mean to—”

“ _Whether you meant to or not doesn’t mean jack shit._ ”

“Doesn’t it?!”

“NO!”

Stephen’s breath hissed in and out of his mouth. He realized that he was letting his emotions go haywire—

Or was he?

“ _Stop it_ ,” he said.

“What?” A fearful Murphy asked.

“ _Let go of me right now_ ,” he warned.

“I’m not doing anything!”

“NOW—”

It was the magic, or the curse, or whatever it was that Murphy poisoned everything around him with. Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Rash actions taken under the influence of sudden, passionate volatility—no matter how characteristic or not—included. Stephen took a step back. Caught his breath. Tamed himself. Constructed fortifications in his mind. Returned to the task at hand with a level head.

“...I’m sorry.”

Murphy said the very words that Stephen was about to utter. His mouth stopped, parted where it was.

“I always make sure that I have sick days saved for the Thirteenth,” Murphy continued, with a cracking voice, “Always... But then I got sick. Hospital stay-sick. I used up my whole leave… I couldn’t call out... I’d lose my job...

“Is it getting hard to breathe in here”—Murphy tugged at his shirt collar, a finger disappearing under the roll of fat beneath his chin—“or is it just me?” He began to hyperventilate. “ _Oh god_ —”

Stephen snapped out of his stupor and rounded the table.

“Mallory—”

Murphy leaned over the table, chest heaving erratically. Without thinking, Stephen took hold of his shoulder.

“Mallory, listen to my voice—”

Stephen tensed like he’d been shocked, and fainted.


	2. Search

Stephen wrenched up from the floor the second he regained the faintest hint of consciousness and looked around. Murphy was gone. The Cloak, having been startled by its master’s sudden movement, huddled around him, clasped his shoulders, and hefted him to his feet.   
  
“Mallory?!” he called. God, he felt like keeling over. His body ached and now his head throbbed too. “ _Why didn’t you stop him…?_ ” The question was directed at the Cloak but he knew it was needless for two reasons: one, it couldn’t answer—at least not effectively enough to convey a clear reason—and two, it probably _tried_. Stephen held his head and the semi-sentient fabric lifted his feet from the floor, drifting him in the direction of the sanctum’s foyer. It brought him outside, which indicated that it knew Murphy wasn’t hiding somewhere inside his home. Stephen pulled Murphy’s wallet from within the breast of his tunic. He had meant to return the thing after picking his pocket but was glad he forgot. He flipped it open and looked at the driver’s license inside.   
  
88 Leonard Street suite 607.   
  
Stephen had to leave the Mirror Dimension in order to use his phone’s GPS. Once he locked onto Murphy’s likeliest location, he took off from the rooftop of his townhouse. The Cloak whisked him southbound across Manhattan at a peak twenty-five miles per hour. He was grateful for the piece of antique outerwear; with it, he could bypass all obstructive traffic and enjoy a nice, aerial view of his neighborhood. The wind helped relieve his pain too. He soared, Google Maps at the ready, and spoke curt, occasional directions. The trip was twenty minutes by foot. By magical garment, it was something like two. In that something like two, Stephen caught a lot of eyes.   
  
“Look!”   
  
“Is that the Optimyst?!”   
  
He shuddered. Stephen still hadn't completely embraced the name given to him by the general public. It had been months since he was first “discovered” and he still hadn’t taken to public recognition. As flattering as it was, Stephen made a point not to indulge his own ego. The work he did wasn’t done to that end. The moment he stopped to pose for a picture or so much as shook the mayor’s hand, he’d be selling out to old, self-centered vices. Still, at that moment, he felt prompted to give a courteous wave to the civilian phone cameras angled up at him. A mere gesture of polite acknowledgment. But he was too weathered to pay them any mind. Weathered and preoccupied.   
  
Stephen Strange had very little knowledge of Mallory Murphy’s affliction. He had never encountered anything like it before. It was a chaotic construct that swaddled his life and it was a real wonder how he was even able to function with a thread of normalcy. It was also curious how he had managed to live in New York’s metropolis—for however long he did—without ever coming up on someone’s radar. Questions piled up in his mind and he sorted them into neat stacks, each of which he intended to address in its own time. Thus far, this was what he presumed to know:   
  
Murphy’s “law” somehow had a neural link to the limbic system of his brain, specifically the amygdala, prefrontal cortex—possibly the hippocampus? Fear was a trigger. Possibly anger was another. (Amidst his musings, Stephen had to admit that he would’ve enjoyed having an opportunity to open up Murphy’s head and have a poke around.) Murphy suffered from anxiety, possibly Generalized but Stephen wasn’t versed in psychology, so he steered away from a provisional diagnosis. Lastly—he was loathed to acknowledge—the coincidence of Friday and the date of the thirteenth was an apparent, particularly aggressive trigger. Stephen had been so indifferent to today’s date that he had forgotten it was the Thirteenth until Murphy mentioned it. He gave a heavy, displeased sigh. The big question regarding this ludicrous factor was whether Murphy’s law was a psychosomatic response to the unlucky “holiday” or a product of it.   
  
He _really_ hoped it was the former.   
  
Upon arriving at 88 Leonard Apartments, Stephen redressed himself in the Mirror Dimension. He cracked a doorway in the open air below him, and the Cloak slowed, tilting his body upright. Stephen descended to the building's sixth story with glittering shards pinwheeling and shifting around him like ripples in water. He entered the building through a window unhindered. It was easier to invade the complex and find Murphy this way. So he thought.   
  
Finding—or rather, fighting his way to Murphy’s apartment reminded Stephen of an adage once spoken to him by the Ancient One: “ _You cannot beat a river into submission._ ” First, this particular river made him slip on a wet floor. Next, it dropped an electric fan from the ceiling but the Cloak yanked him out of the way. Then, as if he had triggered a booby trap in an _Indiana Jones_ movie, it crystalized the atmosphere and thrust space shards at him.   
  
He fled the Mirror Dimension.   
  
A housekeeper, the lone witness in the hallway, screamed when Stephen staggered out of a new entryway on his heels—producing the sound of a large window shattering—and hit a wall. He dropped to the floor, narrowly avoiding impalement by a crown of spikes that struck the sheetrock with force. The sound reverberated through the halls like gunshots from a firing squad. Stephen clipped the portal shut, snapping the shards off, and they dissolved in wisps. He scrambled to his feet, cursing as concerned tenants poke their heads out of their doors to see a man in a red cape running by without explanation. A couple of them were calling security. He turned a sharp corner.   
  
_607, 6-oh shit—_   
  
“YOU! STOP RIGHT THERE!”   
  
Security. _Armed_ security. The uniformed man was right in his way. Stephen only hesitated for a split-second. He sprinted right at him.   
  
“HALT! STOP!” The man had his gun aimed. Stephen leaped and the Cloak of Levitation sped him down the corridor. He was coming up fast.   
  
" _I SAID STOP!_ "   
  
Stephen whipped open another doorway to the Mirror Dimension. Shots popped. Stephen breached. The guard vanished.   
  
A grand piano collapsed through the ceiling. A stray space shard shot out, piercing the Cloak. It ripped from Stephen. Inertia spat him out. He hit the floor, tumbling like a rag doll. The piano crashed—just barely missing him. Feet from the demolished instrument and the destruction it wreaked, Stephen’s body stopped. Lying prostrate, he stared at the near-miss just shy of his face and caught his breath.   
  
Stephen’s pain was the only thing audible inside the eerie quiet. That and the sound of his apparel flapping against the wall on the other side of the heaping mess. He rolled onto an aggrieved side. Friction burns smarted on his face and hands, bruises effloresced, his hip raged, and he was pretty sure he had a fractured rib or two. He may as well have jumped from a moving vehicle. Stephen struggled to his feet, favoring his left. The shard smashed and the Cloak flipped over the piano to crutch him.   
  
He heard cracks behind him. The door. Stephen snapped around and his breath stopped. The security guard passed through, appearing on the other side of the beveled glass. He looked around, baffled.   
  
“ _What the hell—_ ”   
  
“ _NO!_ ” A spike lanced the guard. He crumpled on the floor. Stephen shut the portal and stared at the body bleeding out on the floor yards away. He resisted the urge to leg the piano. Except for a spasming chest, he remained perfectly still. “ _Fuck_ ,” he breathed. “ _Fuck…_ ”   
  
As if he was standing on a landmine, Stephen swiveled his head to look at the doors flanking his sides.   
  
Apartment 607 was exactly on his right.   
  
Stephen tried the knob. Then pulled out a battle ax from hammerspace—a nifty little pocket dimension that he stitched to his person—and began hacking his way through the locked door with wild blows. In his frenzy, the head snapped off of the handle. He used a series of sharp heel-kicks on the splintered wood instead. When getting nowhere fast, he groaned, “ _Oh, for fuck’s sake_ ,” and blasted his way in using the Bolts of Balthakk. He had wanted to avoid conjuring dimensional magic throughout this fiasco—fearful that usage might trigger disaster—but a stubborn door finally forced his hand.   
  
He drifted into the modern apartment with his feet dangling above the floor and a hand cradling his ribs. The air inside was sharp. It hurt Stephen to breathe. The very molecules he inhaled were laced with microscopic chips of glass. He kept his breaths shallow and spaced out.   
  
Stephen found Murphy in his bedroom, curled up behind his bed, stiff, with his face nestled in his arms. It was very difficult for him to believe that Murphy hadn’t maimed him and killed the guard _deliberately._ His voice was coarse, both angry and exhausted.   
  
“ _Mallory—_ ”   
  
“It's Murphy, Freakenstein.”   
  
Stephen set his jaw, annoyed by the childish antics the man had taken up. He checked his emotions back at the sanctum but he could feel them rebuilding. The urge to snap, to let him face his wrath, mounted. But he ripped the foundational antagonisms out with his fingers, sending the rising structure crumbling back to the earth. In the clouds of dust left behind, Stephen Strange willed himself to accept that if the guard’s death was anyone’s fault, it was his own.   
  
“…I'm sorry, Murphy," he finally amended. He purchased a quick inhale, which felt like dragging cat claws down his trachaea and into his lungs. "I shouldn't have… lost my cool on you… and I shouldn't have touched you… while you were in the middle of a panic attack.”   
  
“Why’re _you_ apologizing? Both those things were my fault.” Stephen was going to refute his claim but saw the faint sheen of tear streaks running down his face when he finally looked up. Murphy’s eyes widened. “…Oh my god—”   
  
“Murphy—”   
  
“ _Did I do that to you?_ ”   
  
“ _Murphy—_ ”   
  
A sob.   
  
The molecules turned into granules. Stephen choked. His hand lashed out. Murphy yelled.   
  
The bedroom burst with a lavender-colored spray. Stephen let out a strangulated gasp and his lungs chased out the now-gaseous substance in a violent coughing fit. The Cloak dropped him and raced to Murphy, who had been anesthetized by the Mists of Morpheus. Stephen's feet hit the floor. The impact jammed his injured hip and his knees buckled. Murphy fell into the folds of the Cloak's fabric. It hoisted his heavy figure onto his bed then slipped out from underneath and returned to its master, who was on the floor, sputtering and wheezing. It clamped back down and massaged Stephen's hunched, aching shoulders.   
  
The air was breathable again. Rasping and wary, he checked his surroundings. As far as he could tell, no threats perched in wait. The Mirror Dimension’s environment altogether impressed upon him a sense of tranquility. It was once again the placid realm he had always known it to be. This told Stephen that Murphy’s law only applied while he was conscious. Conscious and emotionally unstable. A _lucky_ thing. He would’ve asphyxiated in a few moments. The Cloak helped Stephen up from the floor and he took a winded seat at the foot of the bed. Stephen winced and tried to wait out his torment. Even though his body wanted to quit, he looked upon Mallory Murphy with pity. Then something settled in his eyes that quelled the flickers of empathetic light within them.   
  
They weighed him like a set of scales.   
  
His shoulders racked with another lapse of thick coughs and he curled forward. He covered his mouth with the back of his hand. When Stephen looked, he saw specks of blood on his scarred skin.


	3. [Pending]

Since learning that Murphy posed a threat to him in the Mirror Dimension, Stephen had to find a new, safe realm where he could harbor his detainee. With the help of the Sling Ring, he transported them back to the sanctum, intersected with a film of violet light. The Cloak of Levitation first carted its master to a bed in one of the town house’s several guest rooms, then retrieved Murphy and laid his unconscious form on the mattress behind him. After, Stephen considered the dead guard lying in the hall outside of the apartment.  
  
In his old line of work, Stephen had surrounded himself with death every day. It was something he had become desensitized to. But he had the luxury of becoming numb to it within a formal, academic setting. At the most he only witnessed the aftermath of the violence people took against each other, took against themselves, or were inflicted with by various other agents. Seeing life taken by brutal means right in front of him wasn’t something that Stephen was used to. He didn’t realize how much innocence he still had up until he saw Master Drumm run through by Kaecilius.  
  
The image of the guard’s body formed from the swirling colors behind his eyelids.  
  
He should have legged the piano. Should have gone to help the man but with Murphy in distress, the Mirror Dimension was unstable and every second was precious and dangerous in equal measure. Stephen willed the Cloak to bring him back out into the hallway, stripping away the purple filter and reentering the glassy realm. More thick, restricted coughs shook his frame and blood affronted his taste buds. His lungs burned. The sanguine fluid pooled beneath the victim’s torso looked like a shiny resin. It hurt to stoop and check his pulse. He already knew, but he had to confirm it anyway.  
  
Then Stephen did the only and best thing he knew to do in this situation: pass the deceased off into capable and qualified hands.  
  
  


✦

  
  
Ever since Stephen Strange turned up out of the blue back at Metro General wearing a traditional Eastern ensemble that was severely out of place among a sea of scrubs and white coats, Dr. Nicodemus West knew that he was teetering on the precarious edge of the heroic world. Nic hadn’t once delighted in his rival’s demise, but there was something offensive about his resurgence to greatness. While he was now uncontested as a doctor, Strange transcended him even further than before. While he could barely comprehend—and thus feared—the affairs his former colleague immersed himself in, Nic felt a sprig of envy.  
  
The night after Strange carted the bald female patient into his theater, Nic ended his lustrum-long sobriety with a fraudulent prescription.  
  
It was by luck that Strange caught him in his office today.  
  
Nic was sitting at his desk snacking on Funyuns from the vending machine while reviewing a patient’s file when he was _rudely interrupted_ by a hole ripping open in the very fabric of space in front of him. He sprang up from his chair in alarm—yelping, spilling the crispy onions—and backpedaled. Then he saw Strange’s familiar figure, tall and imposing, through the wheel of sparks flying around the room and his fright was subverted with anger.  
  
“God _damn it, Strange!_ What the hell?! What—”  
  
Strange’s grave expression stopped him in his tracks. It was then that Nic noticed that his former colleague looked _battered_. Nevermind the fact that the man was _floating_ ( _Ugh, seriously? He can fly?_ ); he had swatches of bruises and friction burns on his skin, his breathing was labored, and the left half of his body appeared to sag. Was that blood on his—  
  
“Help me.”  
  
The plea in Strange’s voice surprised Nic. He had never heard something so disconcerting from the once-esteemed neurosurgeon before. His bitter contempt got shelved at once when Strange turned aside and revealed a man lying on the ground behind him. Nic’s eyes went wide and he almost sprang into action—but hesitated.  
  
“You can walk through. It’s safe.”  
  
“…Stephen…,” Nic’s voice was slow, careful. Addressing him by his first name was as rare as glimpsing a total solar eclipse. “Did you—”  
  
“ _I didn’t kill him_.” A snarl undercut the cadence of Strange’s interjection and Nic nearly cowered from it.  
  
“…Okay. I believe you.”  
  
Nic moved closer to the portal and, cautious, set foot into the Mirror Dimension. His eyes were locked on the body, but then he realized that the very air around him looked like fractured glass and absorbed his surroundings slack-jawed.  
  
“What on God’s green earth is this?” His voice reverberated here; it spooked him.  
  
“I’ll explain later,” Strange answered and Nic snapped his attention back to the man on the floor of a hallway—inside a hotel? He stooped at the security guard’s side. Strange had turned him to lie supine and watched Nic fumble, holding up his hands. He caught on and opened a smaller portal into one of the outpatient examination rooms. Snagged a pair of nitriles from a box. He handed them to Nic. Nic slowly accepted them and slipped them on.  
  
“What…happened, exactly?” he asked as he examined a deep gouge in the man’s chest cavity that oozed at his touch.  
  
“Cardiac tamponade. He was stabbed.”  
  
“By what?”  
  
“A spear of crystallized space.”  
  
Nic looked at him, confused. He shook his head as if the answer was a dust bunny clinging to his hair.  
  
“Um”—He cleared his throat—“right.”  
  
Nic didn’t bring up that this situation strongly reminisced Strange’s own stabbing. Christine had told him about it not long after Strange left the hospital. It wasn’t that Christine was a gossiper; Nic had noticed that she was shaken when he caught a mistake she made on a prescription for another patient. After pressing her, she told him that Strange came back—mortally wounded from a fight.  
  
_“What?”_  
  
_“I don’t know, he just showed up after being gone for_ months _and he was wearing strange clothes, and he was hurt—”_  
  
_“Hurt?”_  
  
_“He got stabbed. By god knows what, but he almost_ died _while I operated on him—”_  
  
“Nic.”  
  
Nic blinked. Looked up at Strange.  
  
“He needs to be returned to his next of kin, if he has any.”  
  
“…Yeah.” He nodded, looking back down at the deceased. “…Yeah, I’ll take care of him.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
Strange helped Nic carry the guard into the hospital and they set him gently on the carpeted floor. Nic’s heart was pounding in his chest; he feared the implications of just suddenly pulling a _dead body_ out of his own office. So now he was Strange’s lackey? Doing his dirty work? _Garbage disposal?_ A disgusted looked crossed his face. Strange owed him _big time_ and he’d make sure the douchebag paid in full when the time came.  
  
“I wouldn’t put this on you if I had any other choice.” Nic froze. He met Strange’s eyes, which were surprisingly softened. Supposed that was as close to an apology as he would ever get from the man. “I’m sorry.”  
  
Oh.  
  
He wished he’d had his phone camera ready.  
  
“Just…do what you have to,” he responded. “Save the world or whatever it is you do now.”  
  
In spite of the circumstances, a light, grim chuckle seeped through closed lips. “You mean keep doing what I’ve been doing all along?” Strange appeared oddly serene for someone who just deposited collateral into the office of an old workplace rival. He gave a gently chiding shake of his head. “A radical career change never changed that, Nic.”  
  
Holding the dead guard in a squat position, Nic watched Strange withdraw into the portal—feet not once touching the ground. The puzzling man turned to face Nic, eyes inevitably falling to the victim, and with somber respect, glanced back up and gave him a nod. The sparking door closed before his eyes, the last of its sparks fizzled out, and Nic was alone. He stared at the space where Strange once was.  
  
_You motherfucker._  
  
  


✦

  
  
It was a slow process but through trial and error, Stephen measured the right dosage of the Mists of Morpheus in order to keep Mallory Murphy conscious but tranquilized. All the while, Stephen suppressed the urge to take drastic measures for his own health. In the lapses of time between each fudged trial, he meditated in the quietude of the room and attuned his life force; an attempt to regenerate the wounded interstitium tissues of his alveoli, bronchi, and trachea. Each breath was drawn with a light wheeze that stung his insides. Stephen wasn’t sure he would be able to completely heal himself this way, but it would at least delay the onset of a pulmonary edema.  
  
The last time Murphy awoke and almost lapsed into an attack, Stephen administered the Mists once again and the effect was instantaneous: Murphy lulled into passivity, complete with slow-blinking eyes and slurred speech.  
  
Success at last.  
  
“What was that?” he drawled, flat.  
  
“A spell to help keep your anxiety at bay.”  
  
“Ya sedated me...?”  
  
“I had to. Your power is too volatile when you’re emotionally compromised.”  
  
Murphy seemed to briefly consider this. He shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah…that’s fair.” Stephen didn’t think so. “So...what now?”  
  
“We have to figure out what exactly is the source of your power and find a way to neutralize it so that you can live a full, functional life.” Murphy gave a soft scoff; it lacked indignance.  
  
“Yeah… good luck with’at.”  
  
“I’ll need it.”  
  
“Wait…whaddabout you? Ya dun… need to go to the hospital er anything?” Murphy looked pointedly at the sorcerer’s battered figure.  
  
“Not while I have you in my custody.”  
  
“O-kay… whatever ya say, Doc Odd.”  
  
Despite their situation, Stephen felt himself beginning to grow surprisingly fond of the man’s quirky sobriquets. He smiled.  
  
“Hey, so,” Murphy continued, reclining on his elbows, “is that, like, yer superhero name or are ya an actual doctor? _Doctor Strange_.”  
  
“That’s my real name, title and all.”  
  
Murphy squinted. “That’s… freaky.”  
  
“Almost as if the powers that be have an ironic sense of humor,” Stephen replied with a knowing look just behind his eyes. “As for the “Doctor” portion, I was a real doctor but I don’t practice medicine anymore.”  
  
“What’d ya specialize in?”  
  
“Neurosurgery.”  
  
“Bullshit.”  
  
“Not in the slightest.”  
  
“Jesus... How’d ya go from an elite, white collar profession to… _this craziness?_ ” Murphy seemed to realize that his intonation could be taken with offense and added, “Uh...no disrespect intended.”  
  
“None taken.” It stung a little. “That’s a long story we don’t have time for.”  
  
“Okay... Why is everything purple...?”  
  
“We’re in the Purple Dimension.”  
  
“...Naturally.”  
  
“Well,” Stephen amended, “it’s more like a liminal space somewhere between the Purple Dimension and ours. The actual Purple Dimension is home to a tyrant named Aggamon who enslaves all inhabitants and foreign trespassers and forces them to mine for precious stones to nourish his insatiable greed for material wealth. This place is just a thin layer of that universe superimposed onto ours. I wedged us in between these realms but situated us closer to our home because I need to be able to access my library and because the farther away we stay from the Purple Dimension, the safer we’ll be.”  
  
The stare he received from Murphy was blank. Murphy sank back onto the pillow.  
  
“...I’m way too high for this.”  
  
“Maybe, but I think we might be onto something, considering you’ve been awake for about five minutes and nothing bad has happened yet.”  
  
Murphy shut his eyes, eyebrows stitching together. “Oh man… don’t jinx it…”  
  
The concept of karma was an insidious fear that even Stephen felt subjected to; he couldn’t help a sprout of worry emerging from the soil. He shifted on the bed, reaping a pang of pain in his hip, and winced.  
  
“ _Yeah, definitely subluxated_ ,” he muttered.  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“No. Tell me.” It was the most coherent Murphy sounded since waking up. Stephen waited. Then barreled down the honest road.  
  
“My hip is partially dislocated.”  
  
Murphy’s eyes widened just a hair. “Dude...go to the hospital.”  
  
“And risk returning to another funhouse of horror?”  
  
Murphy had no rejoinder. The concern in his eyes fizzled out, leaving behind pools of sober penitence. Stephen sighed.  
  
“I’ll be fine. I have a crutch.” He indicated the passive Cloak cradling his own body with a hand. Murphy looked between them, uncertain.  
  
“If ya say so...”  
  
“Murphy, I don’t take oaths lightly. I never swear on empty promises. So know that when I swear that I’ll do everything in my power to help you, I mean it. I won’t stop until I find a solution.”  
  
“...Okay.”  
  
“In order to be able to do that, though, I need to you be open and honest with me. I have questions for you.”  
  
Murphy managed a half-hearted, but goofy smile. “And ya say yer not a real doctor anymore.”


End file.
